The International Conference on Sino–Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL) is a premier meeting for linguistic researchers on the Sino–Tibetan language family, a family with over four hundred languages and second largest only to Indo–European in number of speakers worldwide. The annual conferences on Sino–Tibetan languages and linguistics began on a small scale at Yale in 1968, with only eight conferees sitting around a table, but have grown tremendously over the years. Currently, these conferences generally attract over a hundred participants, and have become the chief focus of scholarly activity in the field. Since 1971, the word “international” has appeared in the official title of the Conferences, and rightly so, since they have become truly global in scope. Since the mid-1970s, they have increasingly been held outside the United States: ICSTLL has been held in 13 different countries, and 24 meetings have been held in the U.S. so far. The 55th conference will be held at Kyoto University, in September 2022. This will be the third meeting taking place in Japan; the 26th meeting was held at the National Museum of Ethnology in 1993, and the 51st meeting was held at Kyoto University in 2018. Kyoto University is located on the eastern side of Kyoto City, near the Imperial Palace. We welcome all linguists who are engaged with and/or interested in the Sino–Tibetan languages, and hope to have fruitful discussions for its future prospects!
A short introduction movie on Kyoto University can be found here: